In Lieu of Courting Justice

How Muzaffarnagar is trying to heal the wounds of the 2013 riots and move on

- Pragya Singh

There can be justice in letting go. It is apt, if ambitious, to remember this tenet of South Africa’s truth and reconciliation commission even as two groups try, in a small corner of India, to put their own differences aside. The scale of trauma doesn’t match, nor does the setting—in South Africa, the truth-­and-reconciliation exercise acc­om­panied the fall of the erstwhile apartheid regime—but there is a few commonalities: one, a society divided into a dominant group and those whom it dominates, allowing an almost neat classification as perpetrator and victim; two, a history of prejudice; and three, large-scale violence and consequent displacement of people. In 2013, 60 people, 40 of them Muslim, were killed and over 40,000 Muslims disp­laced in Muzaffarnagar and Sha­mli districts in western Uttar Pradesh. Now, there are attempts to promote conciliatory talks between Muslims and the dominant Jat community to bury the grief and rage, so people can live peacefully in the troubled region.

Untested so far, the idea of such talks—supposedly aimed at striking a “peace deal” of sorts—has also invited controversy. The effort hinges on survivors on both sides retracting riot-related police cases—somewhat like German automaker BMW settled a class-action lawsuit last year with a $477-million payout. There is no stock format and no official involvement in the Muzaffarnagar exercise, though. Sudhir Panwar, former member, UP Planning Board, and president, Kisan Jagriti Manch, sounds genuinely sanguine: “There is room for reconciliation between Jats and Muslims as nobody stays in the same place emotionally or mentally for long.”

Panwar, who contested the UP poll on a Samajwadi Party ticket from Thana Bhawan, had met party chief Mulayam Yadav in 2014, proposing peace efforts. “Nothing came of it then, but the process started and is continuing,” he says.